Axel Springer hopeful Facebook will make news pay

Reuters Staff

2 Min Read

BERLIN (Reuters) - The chief executive of German publisher Axel Springer is confident that internet companies like Facebook, Snapchat and Google will help news providers make more money from their content.

The logo of the social network Facebook is seen on a beach during the Cannes Lions Festival in Cannes, France, June 21, 2017. REUTERS/Eric Gaillard

News is increasingly being consumed digitally and especially via social media and the company along with much of the industry is shifting from newspapers and magazines to digital products.

“They have to provide a decent business model to attract content onto their platforms,” CEO Mathias Doepfner told a tech conference on Thursday in Berlin. “They have the fake news problem.”

Facebook has come under intense pressure to tackle the spread of false stories, which came to prominence during the U.S. presidential election last year when many inaccurate posts were widely shared on it and other social media services.

Doepfner said the likes of Google and Facebook were increasingly open to thinking about ways to help media companies make money on their platforms.

“These relations are getting better. They need a lot of content,” he said.

On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that News Corp., publisher of The Wall Street Journal and the Times of London, is holding “very advanced” discussions with Facebook about subscriptions to its content online.

(This corrected version of the story deletes reference to earnings in second paragraph).

Reporting by Emma Thomasson; Editing by Elaine Hardcastle and David Evans